


I Must Not Look at Goblin Men

by athousandwinds



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:40:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one really wants a fairy tale to come true. Not one of the bad ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Must Not Look at Goblin Men

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…

That's how fairy-tales begin. It's a rule. If you're gonna have something fantastical happen, it's got to happen somewhere else.

Jethro wonders if his parents know this. Probably not. It's not the sort of thing they'd think about.

Jethro wonders if John Smith, whatever his name was, knows this. Probably not. He made it sound like the fantastical happened to him every day.

Stuff like what happened on Midnight happens to your best friend's cousin's roommate's sister when she goes on safari on the outskirts of the quadrant. Somewhere _else_.

\---

 

It was gonna be so much _fun_, too. And by "fun", Jethro meant "boring".

"Sweetheart," said his mother, timid and hopeful, "wouldn't you like to come on holiday with us?"

Jethro shrugged.

"We're going to _Midnight_ this year," she said, trying to make it sound like Midnight wasn't the most tedious planet this side of the solar system.

"Okay," he said, because at least it wouldn't be the bland, neatly laid-out streets of Jonestown. Because things happened elsewhere, to people who weren't Jethro Cane, living out his bland, neatly laid-out life in a city identical to the next one over.

\---

 

Another thing about fairy-tales: no one ever has a name. They have attributes: snow white, sleeping beauty, little red riding hood. The only one who ever had a name was Rumpelstiltskin, and he was the villain.

Jethro has a name: Jethro Cane, the most boring name in the history of humanity, but it's his. Almost, but not definitely, unique. It's unlikely that he'll ever meet another Jethro Cane in his lifetime.

Now that he thinks about it, sometimes the heroes in fairy-tales are called Jack, which is so generic as to not be someone's name at all.

Like John Smith.

\---

 

Apart from his parents, the only other person from the bus Jethro ever talked to again was DeeDee Blasco. It was a couple of hours after they were rescued; she came looking for him at the hotel.

"Do you know where he is?" she asked. She didn't say who, but her forehead was creased with anxiety.

"I think he's gone. Why?"

"I wanted – " DeeDee swallowed. "I was going to say I was sorry, obviously, but it doesn't seem as important – I found out her name."

It was an ordinary name. Someone calling himself John Smith would have liked it.

\---

 

Someone said that only in fiction are good people are rewarded and bad people punished. Cinderella sleeps in a bed of ashes and ends up in a bed of feathers. The Wicked Queen starts off with stilettos and ends up in red-hot iron clogs.

In real life, good people die, because doing good things is dangerous. It usually involves stopping bad people from doing bad things, and they don't want to be stopped.

Jethro used to think he could be a hero, if he had to be. It's not nice to know that you'd only be part of the mob.

\---

 

After they got back to the hotel, his parents sat at a table in the restaurant, and for the first time since coming to Midnight, Jethro sat there with them. They didn't talk much. Occasionally, his dad seemed to straighten up, clear his throat and say:

"It's not as if – "

But then Jethro's mum looked at him, haunted, and he would slump down again.

Once, he thought he saw John Smith walking like an old man towards the exit, leaning on his companion like a crutch. Jethro didn't say anything, just in case John Smith wouldn't say anything back.

\---

 

Everything happens in threes.

Buses, gods, jokes. (Only, when his dad tells them, they're never funny.) There're three brothers, or three sisters, and the youngest one always makes their fortune. There're three tasks, and the third one is always the most spectacular. There's an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman.

Given that, Jethro shouldn't be involved in a story, or at least not this kind of story. His story is probably Young Adult, or somewhere in the pages of _My Troublesome Teenager_.

On the other hand, there's his father and his mother and him, which he supposes is good enough.

\---

 

They were on the interplanetary transport, thirty light years from Jonestown, when his mother let out a long, heavy sigh.

"Well," she said. "That was an odd trip."

It was like a dam'd burst with his dad. "It was a bit bloody cheeky of that bugger, if you ask me. Going on at us like he was so morally bloody superior, like he knew everything. If he knew everything, why didn't he know what that thing was?"

"Yeah," Jethro said, half-hearted and miserable, and stared out of the window at the impenetrable, unknowable blackness of space all the way home.

\---

 

Finally, lastly, in conclusion, there are happy endings. Only there aren't: the oldest stories don't have them. People die, other people suffer and then they die, too, more painfully. There's a certain mindset which thinks a happy life is a boring life.

There are two versions of any happy ending. One is: "happily ever after" and the other is: "happy until they died". They were all right until then, though, and you can't say fairer than that.

Jethro doesn't know, exactly, what constitutes a happy ending. They get married. They don't die that day; someone else does. Life goes on.

\---

 

In the end, it remained like a sore tooth in Jethro's memory, something which he was forced to poke at once in a while, but which mostly, wisely, he left alone. He intended to go into xenobiology, to upset his parents, but eventually did a course in gravitational engineering, because the pain nagged and he knew it would be wrong.

Sometimes he thought about it at three in the morning, which is the time when people get philosophical. The loneliness makes the human capacity for evil seem very near.

But generally, he forgot about it. Is that a happy ending?


End file.
